A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Episode 28: “Sincerely” by the Moonglows

Episode Date: April 14, 2019

Welcome to episode twenty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at The Moonglows and “Sincerely”. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. (more…)

A history of rock music and 500 songs By Andrew Hockey Episode 28 Sincerely By the Moon glows Hello everybody, hi y'all This is Alan Free of the Old King of the Moondogers And a hearty welcome to all our thousands of friends

in northern Ohio, Ontario, Canada, western New York, western Pennsylvania, West Virginia. Long about 11.30, 15 minutes from now We'll be joining the Moondog Network. Chess Records is one of those labels like Sun, or Stax or PWL, which defined a whole genre. And in the case of chess, the genre it defined was the Electric Chicago Blues. People like Muddy Waters, Elmore James, Howling Wolf, Little Walter, and Willie Dixon, all cut some of their most important recordings for the Chesaxham.

Chess label. I remember when I was just starting to buy records as a child, decades after the events were talking about, I knew before I left primary school that chess, like Sun, was one of the two record labels that consistently put out music that I liked. And yet, when it started out, chess records was just one of dozens of tiny little indie blues labels, like modern or RPM or King Records or Duke or Peacock, many of which were even putting out records by the same people who were recording for chess. So this episode is actually one of a trilogy, and over the next three episodes, we're going to talk about how chess ended up.

being the one label that defined that music in the eyes of many listeners and how that music fed into early rock and roll. And today, we're also going to talk about how it ended up being influential in the formation of another of those important record labels. And to talk about that, we're going to talk about Harvey Fouquhar. Yes, Fouquhar. Even though we talked about his uncle, Charlie Fouquay, back in the episode on The Ink Spot, apparently Harvey pronounced his name differently from his uncle. As you might imagine, having an uncle in the most important black vocal group in history gave young Harvey Fouquhar quite an impetus, even though the two of them weren't close. Fouquhar started a duo with his friend Bobby Lester,

after they both got out of the military. Fouqua would play piano, and they would both sing. The two of them had a small amount of success, touring the south, but then shortly after their first tour, Fuqua had about the worst thing possible happened to him. There was a fire, and both his children died in it. Understandably, he didn't want to stay in Louisville, Kentucky, where he'd been raising his family,

so he and his wife moved to Cleveland. When he got to Cleveland, he met up again with an old friend from his military days, Danny Coggins. The two of them started performing together with a bass singer, Frantus Barnes, under the name The Crazy Sounds. The style they were performing in

was called Vocalese, and it's a really odd style of jazz singing that's the easiest way to explain it is the opposite of scat singing in scat you improvise a new melody with nonsense lyrics about zad zad zo do do do zo that's the standard form of jazz singing other than just singing the song straight it's what louis armstrong or ella fitzgerald or whoever would do in vocal ease on the other hand, you do the opposite. You come up with proper lyrics, not just nonsense syllables, and you put them to a pre-recorded melody. The twist is that the pre-recorded melody you choose is a melody that's already been improvised by an instrumentalist. So, for example, you could take Coleman Hawkins' great sax solo on body and soul. Hawkins improvised that melody line, and

it was a one-off performance. Every other time he played the song, he'd play it differently. But Eddie Jefferson, who is credited as the inventor of Vocalese, learned Hawkins' solo, added words, and sang this. Don't you know he was the king of saxophones? Yes indeed he was. Talking about the guy that made it sound. The crazy. Some people knew him by the beam, but Hockens was his name. He sure could swing and play pretty too. Sounds good to me, should sound good to you.

I love to hear him playing body and so very... The crazy sounds performed this kind of music as a vocal trio for a while, but their sound was missing something. And eventually, Fuqua traveled down to Kentucky and persuaded Bobby Lester to move to Cleveland and join the crazy sounds. They became a four-piece and slowly started writing their own new material in a more R&B style. They performed together a little and eventually auditioned at a club called The Loop, where they were heard by a blues singer called Al Frats Thomas. Thomas apparently recorded for several labels

but this is the only one of his records I can find a copy of anywhere on the chess subsidiary checker from right around the time we're talking about in 1952 Fat Thomas was very impressed by the crazy sounds, and immediately phoned his friend, the DJ Alan Freed. Alan Freed is a difficult character to explain, and his position in rock and roll history is a murky one.

He was the first superstar DJ, and he was the person who more than anyone else made the phrase rock and roll into a term for a style of music, rather than, as it had been, just a phrase that was used in some of that music. Fried had not started out as a rhythm and blues or rock and roll DJ, and in fact had no great love for the music when he started playing it on his show. He was a lover of classical music, particularly Wagner, whose music he loved so much that he named one of his daughters Zieglinder, but he named his first daughter, Alana, which shows his other great love, which was for himself. Freed had been a DJ for several years, when he was first introduced to rhythm and blues music, and he played a mixture of big band music and liked classical,

depending on what the audience wanted. But then, in 1951, something changed. Fried met Leo Mintz, the owner of a record shop named Record Rendezvous, in a bar. Mintz discovered that Fried was a DJ and took him to the shop. Freed later mythologised this moment, as he did a lot of his life, by talking about how he was shocked to see white teenagers dancing to music made by black people, and he had a sort of damascene conversion,

and immediately decided to devote his show to rhythm and blues. The reality is far more prosaic. Mintz, whose business actually mostly sold black people at this point, decided that if there was a rhythm and blues radio show, then it would boost business to his shop, especially if Mintz paid for the radio show, and so bought all the advertising on it. He took Freed to the shop to show him that there was indeed an audience for that kind of music, and Fried was impressed, but said that he didn't know anything about rhythm and blues music. Mintz said that that didn't matter. Mintz would pick

the records. They'd be the ones that he wanted his customers to buy, and he'd tell Freed what to play. All Freed had to do was to play the ones he was told, and everything would work out fine. The music Mint had played for Freed was, according to Freed later, people like Laverne Baker, who had not yet become at all well-known outside Detroit and Chicago at the time. but Mintz set about putting together selections of records that Freed should play. Those records were mostly things with gospel-sounding vocals, a dance beat, or honking saxophones, and Freed found that his audience has responded astonishingly well to it. Freed would often interject during records,

and would bang his fists on the table or other objects in time to the beat, including a cowbell that he had on his desk. Apparently, some of his listeners would be annoyed when they bought the records he played, to find out half the sounds they'd heard weren't on the record at all. Fried took the stage name Moondog, after a blind New York street musician and outsider artist of that name. Fried's theme song for his radio show was Moondog's Symphony by Moondog, a one-man band performance credited to Moondog by himself,

playing drums, maracas, clavets, gourds, hollow legs, Chinese block and symbols. When Fat Thomas got the crazy sounds and audition with Freed, Freed was impressed enough that he offered them a management contract. Being managed by the biggest DJ in the city was obviously a good idea, so they took him up on that, and took his advice about how to make themselves more commercial, including changing their name to emphasize the connection to Freed. They became first the moon puppies and then the moon glows.

Freed set up his own record label, Champagne Records, and released the Moonglowe's first single. I just can't tell no lie. Where do I? According to Freed's biographer John A. Jackson, Freed provided additional percussion on that song, hitting a telephone book in time with the rhythm, as he would on his show. I don't hear any percussion on there, other than the drum kit,

but maybe you can if you have better ears than me. This was a song that had been written by the moon-list. themselves, but when the record came out, both sides were credited to Al Lance, which was a pseudonym for Alan Freed. And so the DJ who was pushing their record on the radio was also their manager, and the owner of the record company, and the credited songwriter. Unsurprisingly then, Freed promoted I Just Can't Tell No Lie, heavily on his radio show, but it did nothing anywhere outside of Cleveland.

and the immediately surrounding area. Danny Coggins quit the group, fed up with their lack of success, and he was replaced by a singer who variously went under the names Alex Graves, Alex Walton, Pete Graves and Pete Walton. Freed closed down Champagne Records. For a time, it looked like the Moonglowe's career was going to have peaked with their one single, as Freed signed another vocal group, the Coronet. and got them signed to Chess Records in Chicago.

Chess was a blues label, which had started in 1947 as Aristocrat Records, but in 1948 it was bought out by two brothers, Leonard and Phil Chess, who had emigrated from Poland as children and anglicised their names. Their father was in the liquor business during the Prohibition era, which in Chicago meant he was involved without. Capone, and in their 20s, the Chess brothers had started running nightclubs in the black area of Chicago. Chess, at its start, had the artists who had originally recorded for aristocrat, people like Muddy Waters and Sunnyland Slim, and they also licensed records made by Sam Phillips in Memphis, and because of that, put out early

recordings by Howling Wolf, before just poaching wolf for their own label, and Jackson Becky Brentston's Rocket 88. By 1954, thanks largely to their in-house bass player and songwriter Willie Dixon, chess had become known as the home of Electric Chicago Blues and were putting out classic after classic in that genre. But they were still interested in putting out other styles of black music too, and were happy to sign up do-wop groups. The Coronets put out a single, Nadine on chess, which did very well. The credited writer was Alan Freed. The coronet's follow-up single

did less well though, and chess dropped them. But Freed had been trying for some time to make a parallel career as a concert promoter. and indeed a few months before he signed the moon glows to a management contract, he had put on what is now considered the first major rock and roll concert, the Moondog Coronation Ball at the Cleveland Arena. That show had been Freed's first inkling of just how popular he and the music he was playing were becoming. 20,000 people tried to get into the show,

even though the arena only had a capacity of 10,000. and the show had to be cancelled after the first song by the first performer, because it was becoming unsafe to continue. But Freed put on further shows at the arena, with better organisation, and in August 1953 he put on the Big Rhythm and Blues show. This featured Fats Domino and Big Joe Turner, and the moon glows were also put on the bill. As a result of their appearance on the show,

they got signed to Chance Records, a small label whose biggest act was the do-what group, the Flamingos. Freed didn't own this label, of course, but by this time he'd got into the record distribution business, and the distribution company he co-owned was Chance's distributor in the Cleveland area. The other co-owner was the owner of Chance Records, and Freed's brother was the distributor's vice president, and in charge of running it.

The Moon Glow's first single on Chance, a Christmas single, did nothing in the charts, but they followed it with a rather unusual choice. Secret Love was a hit for Doris Day, from the soundtrack of her film, Calamity Jane. In the context of the film, which has a certain amount of what we would now call queer baiting, that song could be read as a song about lesbianism or bisexuality. But that didn't stop a lot of male artists covering it for other markets.

We've talked before about how popular songs would be recorded in different genres, and so Day's pop version was accompanied by Slim Whitman's country version, and by this by the Moonglows Unfortunately, a fortnight after the Moonglows The Orioles, who were a much more successful doo-wop group, released their own record of the song, and the two competed for the same market. it. However, Secret Love did well enough, given a promotional push by Freed, that it became

apparent that the Moonglows could have a proper career. It sold over 100,000 copies, but then their next few records on Chance failed to sell, and Chance closed down when their biggest act, the Flamingos moved first to parrot records and then quickly on to chess. It seemed like everything was against the moon glows, but they were about to get a big boost, thanks in part to a strike. WINS Radio in New York had been taken over at a rock-bottom price by an investment consortium, who wanted to turn the money-losing station into a money-maker. It had a powerful transmitter, and if they could boost listenership, they would almost certainly be able to sell it on at a massive profit. one of the first things the new owners did was to sack their house band. They weren't going to

pay musicians anymore, as live music was too expensive. This caused the American Federation of musicians to picket the station, which was expected and understandable. But WINS also had the broadcast rights to the New York Yankees games. Indeed, the ball games were the only really popular thing that the station had, and so the AFM started to picket Yankee Stadium 2, on the week of the starting game for what looked to be the Yankees' sixth World Series win in a row. That game would normally have had the opening ball thrown by the mayor of New York, but the mayor, Robert Wagner, rather admirably refused to cross a picket line. The Bronx borough president substituted for him, and through the opening ball,

right into the stomach of a newspaper photographer. W INS now desperately needed something to go right for them, and they realised Freed's immense drawing power. They signed him for the unprecedented sum of $75,000 a year, and Freed moved from the mid-market town of Cleveland to a huge, powerful transmitter in New York. He instantly became the most popular DJ in New York, and probably the best known DJ in the world. And with his great power, came record labels wanting to do Freed favours. He was already friends with the Chess Brothers,

and with the sure knowledge that any record the Moonglows put out would get airplay from Freed, they eagerly signed the Moonglows and put out Sincerely. Sincerely featured Bobby Lester on lead vocals, but the song was written by Harvey Fouquhar, or, as the label credited it, Harvey Fouquhar and Alan Freed. But while those were the two credited writers,

the song owes more than a little to another one. Here's the bridge for Sincerely. And here's the bridge for That's What You're Doing to Me, by Billy Ward and the Dominoes, written by Billy Ward and sung by Clyde McFatter. So while I'm critical of Fruke She doesn't want me But I never

I never Ford For taking credit where it's not deserved It should be remembered that Foucair wasn't completely clean when it came to this song either Sincerely rose to number one

On the R&B charts Thanks in large part To Freed's promotion It knocked Earth Angel off the top and was in turn knocked off by pledging my love and it did relatively well in the pop chart although once again it was kept off the top of the pop chart by an insipid white cover version

this time by the Maguire Sisters Chess wanted to make as much out of the moon glows as they could and so they decided to release records by the group under multiple names and on multiple labels. So while the moon glows were slowly rising up the charts on chess, the moonlighters put out another single, My Loving Baby, on Cheka. My loving baby, you are the breath of me and Sunday, baby, you be the death of me, my loving baby,

you are all and all. My loving baby can do without you, even the people, There were two, my loving baby You are my whole I go to sleep at night Where I just dream of you Baby, you know I know I know

There were two Moonlighters singles in total Though neither did well enough for them to continue under that name And on top of that They also provided backing vocals On records by other chess artists Most notably, they sang the backing vocal goes on Didly Daddy by Bo Didley. The moon glows, don't, num, num, dum, did he days?

My pretty baby grouching, all one. The moon glows, or moonlighters, weren't the only ones performing under new names, though. The real Moondog had, once Freed came to New York, realized that Freed had taken his name and sued him. Freed had to pay Moondog $5,700 and stopped calling himself Moondog. He had to switch to using his real name.

and along with this he changed the name of his show to the rock and roll party the term rock and roll had been used in various contexts before of course the theme for this series in fact comes from almost 20 years before this but it had not been applied to a form of music on a regular basis Fried didn't want to get into the same trouble with the phrase rock and roll as he had with the name Moondog and so he formed a company, Sieg Music, which was owned by himself, the promoter Lou Platt, WynS Radio and the gangs, I'm sorry, the legitimate businessman and music publisher, Morris Levy. We'll be hearing more about Levy later. This company trademarked the phrase rock and roll. The book I got this information from says they copyrighted the phrase, but I think that that's a confusion between copyright and trademark law on the writer's part,

and they started using it for Freed's now branded rock and roll shows, both on radio and on stage. The only problem was that the phrase caught on too much, thanks to Freed's incessant use of the phrase on his show. There was no possible way they were going to be able to collect royalties from everyone who was using it, and so that particular money-making scheme faltered. The moon glows, on the other hand, had a run of minor hits. None were as big as sincerely, but they had five R&B top ten hits, and a bunch more in the top 20. The most notable, and the one people remember, is Ten Commandments of Love from 1958.

Love another. I shall never love another. And stand by me all the while. And stand by me all the while. Take happiness with the heart aches. Take happiness with the heart aches. And go through life wearing a smile. And go through life wearing a smile.

But that song wasn't released as by The Moon Glows, but by Harvey and the Moonglows. There was increasing tension between the different members of the band, and songs started to be released as by Harvey and the Moonglows, or by Bobby Lester in the Moonglows, as Chess faced the fact that the group's two lead singers would go their separate ways. Chess had been contacted by some Detroit-based songwriters, who were setting up a new late. label, Anna, and wanted Chess to take over the distribution for it. By this point, Harvey Foucair

had divorced his first wife, and was working for Chess in the back room, as well as as an artist, and he was asked by Leonard Chess to go over and work with this new label. He did, and he married one of the people involved, Gwen Gordy. Gwen and her brother ended up setting up a lot of different labels, and Harvey got to run a few of them himself. There was Tri-Fi and Harvey Records. There was a whole family of different record labels owned by the same family, and they soon became quite successful. But at the same time, he was still performing and recording for chess. We heard one of his singles, a duet with Etta James, in the episode on the Wallflower. But it's so good we might as well play a bit of it again here.

But at the same time, both Bobby Lester and Harvey Fouquhar were performing with rival groups of Moonglows, who continued recording for chess. Harvey's Moonglows was an entire other vocal group, a group from Washington, D.C., called The Marquise, who'd had one single out, Wyatt Earp. That single had been co-written by Bo DeWhorpe.

Diddley, a chess artist who had tried to get the group signed to chess. When they'd been turned down, Didley took them to OK instead. The king of the west, a better shot than all the risks. The fastest man I see with the gun. When you see him, you better run. You know who I mean. Foucair hired the marquise and renamed them, and they recorded several tracks as Harvey and the Moon glows. And while none of them were very successful commercially, some of them were musically interesting.

This one in particular featured a lead from a great young vocalist who would in 1963 become Harvey Foucair's brother-in-law when he married Gwen's sister Anna. that record didn't do much but that singer was to go on to bigger and better things as was Harvey Fouquhar when one of the Gordie family's labels became a little bit better known than the rest with Fouquhar working for it as a record producer and head of artist development but the story of Motown records and of that singer Marvin Gaye is for another time. Next week we're going to continue the chess story with a look at another song that Alan Freed got a co-writing credit for. Come back in a week's time to hear the story of how Chuck Berry came up with Mabelene.

Well gang, thank you. For all we leave tonight we'd like to say special thanks. We don't have much time to thank everybody, especially to our friends in the music business and to our wonderful friends here and all of you out there. for your great loyalty. This is not goodbye. It's just good night and we'll see you soon. Thank you. A history of rock music and 500 songs is written produced and performed by Andrew Hickey. Visit 500Songs.com. That's 50000, the numbers, songs.com to see transcriptions, liner notes and links to other materials including a mixed cloud stream of all songs

excerpted in this episode. A history of rock music and 500 songs is supported by the the backers on my Patreon, visit patreon.com slash Andrew Hickey to support it. Patreon backers also get early access to my books and also support my blog and my other podcasts. If you've enjoyed this episode, please by all means subscribe in iTunes or your favourite podcast app and rate it,

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